One hundred years ago, at least in the English-speaking world, Victorian culture was still everywhere dominant, and the first faint squeaks of Modernism were only being heard in France, Germany, and Italy. John Singer Sargent was the lion among painters, and no one had bested Charles Dickens as a novelist. And yet, the world had been connected through radio, the airplane had been invented, popular comics were spreading throughout American newspapers, and, most important of all, movies were just beginning to occupy the human imagination.

These latter developments happened all at once, and the impression they left behind was of speed -- a world changing so rapidly that even fashion could not keep pace. Through Dec. 7, the Metropolitan Museum is showing "Rhythms of Modern Life: British Prints 1914-1939," an exhibition devoted to the first English artists to try to get in this fast lane.

They were called the Vorticists, a name given them in their magazine, "BLAST," by none other than American poet Ezra Pound (four numbers of "BLAST," including the first, are on display here). The Vorticists were the original artists in the Anglo-Saxon world to try to come directly to terms with Modernism and its handmaiden, abstraction, quite consciously playing catch-up to Cubism and its Italian competitor, Futurism. The Vorticists are not well known because the two world wars not only killed their most gifted exponents, the fighting also destroyed much of their work. But this show, appearing just as faith in Modernism is waning, tries to revive their moderate, Third-Way approach to art. And it's fascinating.

Brightly colored and often highly geometric, Vorticist prints were deeply indebted to Futurism, with its intense colors and expressive lines of force. But the Vorticists never really became warmongers like the Italians. In fact, their leading proponent in Britain, C.R.W. Nevinson, who like the Futurists at first championed war as a means of purging society of the old and decadent, spent three months driving ambulances in Flanders and became, remarkably, profoundly anti-war.

You can lead an Englishman to war, but you can't make him think -- at least, not the way you want him to. The dogged individualism of Victorian art, its high-minded and often ridiculous dedication to moral uplift, saved Nevinson and the rest of these English artists from following Pound to Fascist Italy, where he made radio broadcasts for Mussolini. So while the talented artists Pound championed, like painter Wyndham Lewis and sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska (killed in the first war), had deep universalist ambitions, the second generation of British printmakers, like Sybil Andrews, Leonard Beaumont, Cyril Power, Lill Tschudi, and their teacher Claude Flight were much more parochial, much more British to the core.

These are the artists whose work has survived, and whose prints make up the bulk of this show. They made prints by cutting into linoleum blocks, which were thinly inked and then laid with whispery Japanese papers and hand-rubbed. Most of these artists went to the Grosvenor School of Modern Art in London, where Flight taught linocut. And they had a good, middle-class joy about them: See Power's "The Eight" or "The Merry-Go-Round," Flight's "Speed," Andrews's "Speedway," or Tschudi's "In the Circus." And giddyup.